Camerun Washington Dr.

Tucker PHIL 110 Ethics 8 March 2013 Inherent Code of Ethics There are specific injustices in the world in which every individual begins to form and create opinion upon. These opinions may seem irrational or even justified in response to the crimes in question. In the case of medical experiments upon unwilling, misinformed, or mentally handicapped individuals breed a litter of ethical questions and concerns about the physicians and scientific professionals and their actions. In assessing the medical experiments, I use the code of ethics that as long as individuals are welled informed, they are inherently capable of making better decisions. This principle is important because it builds upon the ancient saying that knowledge is power, and in the case of the African-Americans in the Tuskegee experiments, better knowledge about the biomedical experiments could have potentially prevented their gruesome ends. For an individual to become better informed about a given situation questions must be asked, research has to be performed, and there must be a level of mental capability to decipher jargon frequently used in professional practice. My code of ethics may seem obvious and distant, but it is important in that it removes the factor of uneducated from the fallacy of an individual. For example, when a person is faced with the decision of having to buy a new car, he or she must have significant knowledge of the price, make, model, problems, gas mileage, and styling of the vehicle in question. Without this knowledge the individual makes a poor decision when

purchasing the vehicle. The factor that my code of ethics removes may, in practice, decrease the probability of bad ethical decision. In application to the Tuskegee trials, if the African-Americans in question knew that the ads used to lure them in for spinal taps was too ambiguous to be legitimate, it may have saved them from death. This code of ethics helps me come to terms with the fact that this happened partially because these individuals were uninformed and uneducated. The use of human subjects for experimentation without consent is done through trickery, not blatant language. This piece of information helps me better understand that this process can and does happen because individuals are not knowledgeable. In using my guide, I feel that it alleviates the constant jump to an emotional and sometimes irrational decision. When the tragedy of September 11th occurred, many Americans had emotions of resentment, fear, and tragedy while looking to their commander in chief to exhibit these same emotions. While, the former president expressed his sincerest apologies and obvious anger over the situation, the decision to engage in war was not formulated within the first twenty-four hours of the attack. The presidents ability to assess the situation, remove emotion, and make a good decision is the basis for how my code of ethics enacts itself. With emotion removed from the situation, my guide places facts and figures back into the situation which in turn gives a clearer more defined picture to the situation. With this, the argument may be raised: How do we educate the underprivileged or the impoverished? Herein lays the drawback to my code of ethics. There must be resources and time available to helping underprivileged individuals attain the same level of knowledge as their counterparts in the same society. Unfortunately, this is question has much more ethical and economic concerns surrounding it than my code of ethics can surround.

When an individual does not educate themselves, they become weak and malleable. These heinous experiments conducted by physicians in the Tuskegee trials prove that an uninformed and impoverished pool of individuals can be lead astray through the trickery of language. My code of ethics helps me to remove emotion from the situation and assess the situation through a factual point of view. I appreciate this because when feelings become intertwined into decisions, the outcome is usually never favorable. It is through this guide, that I draw conclusions on topics of ethics.